Supercharge your sales collateral

Local newspapers can supercharge their sales collateral with emma. Chapter five in our Think Local series shows how regional and community sales teams can use this information to showcase just how valuable their audience can be to advertisers.

By providing better audience personas, up to date shopper data and detailed brand attitudes, local newspapers can lift their sales proposals and produce content to open conversations with clients.

Here’s five examples of how you can use emma to sell your local audience.

1. Prove your readers are local shoppers

The distribution area of many local newspapers overlaps with the catchment area of at least one shopping centre or mall.

Some 4.5million regional newspaper readers and 2.4million community newspaper readers visited their local shopping centre last month.

This information can be used to great effect by local newspapers to engage advertisers who have retail space in the shopping centre that serves their readers. Providing granular knowledge of local shoppers and proving that your title reaches them is a compelling sales case.

Explore retail data in emma to display your knowledge of local shoppers and how your title reaches them.

EXAMPLE: Some 54 percent of shoppers at the Warringah Mall in NSW read a community newspaper. That’s 95,000 urban shoppers a month who can be targeted with retail offers by brands with a presence in this local shopping centre. Community newspaper, The Manly Daily, can present a great case to retailers at Warringah Mall – the title is regularly read by one in four of their shoppers (27%).

2. Show how engaged your audience is

emma measures how engaged readers are with their local newspaper – we’ve highlighted this in chapters one and two.

EXAMPLE: Here’s a set of engagement metrics that show just how important SA regional newspaper, The Southern Times Messenger, is to its readers.

3. Add depth to audience personas

Reader profiles, aka personas, are an important element in sales collateral that give advertisers insight into the types of consumers their ads might reach.

Many brands produce campaigns planned using detailed customers segmentation and choose advertising platforms that best reach their target segments. The more information local newspapers can provide around their reader personas, the better.

Use attitude and behaviour data to add detail to your customer personas.

EXAMPLE: The table below shows some attitudinal and psychographic data from readers of Tasmanian regional newspaper, The Advocate, and NSW local title, The Wentworth Courier. This type of data can be used to bring more life to reader personas.

4. Show local brand perceptions

Brand attitudes and usage can change from town to town. For example, in WA, Woolworths is the most popular supermarket chain attracting 36 percent of shoppers while Coles is number one in Victoria (32%).

Presenting information on how a local audience perceives a brand can be useful in two ways. One, it shows a proactive understanding of the challenges facing a brand at local level. Two, it can inspire brands to use local marketing and can give them direction on what creative and messaging to use.

With emma, publishers can show the level of brand penetration among their audience or local area in general in some key verticals.

Show what your audience (or target audience) think of brands that you are pitching to. Use this information to pitch ideas on campaign strategy.

EXAMPLE: Optus is the second biggest mobile phone carrier in Australia in terms of customer numbers and it is chasing Telstra, one market at a time.

If we take Geelong in Victoria as a sample telco market, we see Telstra has one in two mobile phone customers compared with Optus on 15 percent local market share.

We’ve shown in chapter one how Vodafone used local newspapers to change negativity toward the brand in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs and lift consideration scores, and Optus could do the same to win market share from Telstra in Geelong.

The Geelong Advertiser has a strong readership base in the area with 116,000 readers a month, and 21 percent of this audience have Optus in their consideration set. This offers Optus a large local audience and the ability to tailor messaging specifically to the local market.

5. Show what products your audience is in the market for

Knowing what products your audience are actively thinking about buying is valuable information that advertisers will be keen to hear.

With emma, local newspapers can provide detailed information on what products and services shoppers intend to buy in the coming 12 months.

This information covers a range of key categories including retail, finance, home appliances and electronic goods.

It may open doors to advertisers who may not have considered local newspapers in their mix.

Use intention to buy information to show advertisers what your audience is actively thinking about buying.

EXAMPLE: Here are some of the main products that readers of The Central Coast Express Advocate in NSW intend to buy in the next 12 months.

This makes compelling reading for electronic goods, home appliance and insurance advertisers in the area.

Case Study: Carlton Mid Hooks Queenslanders with Local Newspapers*

The beer, Carlton Mid were stuck at 20 per cent share of the Queensland mid-strength beer market.

The beer, Carlton Mid was stuck at 20 percent share of the Queensland mid-strength beer market. It had been fighting, unsuccessfully, to win market share from category leader XXXX Gold. As a bigger brand, XXXX Gold has a bigger marketing spend, including high profile Queensland sports sponsorships.

A cycle of simple sales promos and funny ads was maintaining Carlton Mid’s position in the local market, but the brand could not gain on XXXX Gold.

Setting Targets

Carlton Mid owner United Brewery and its ad agency Clemenger BBDO & Proximity in Melbourne worked together to form brand and sales objectives to take on XXXX Gold.

Brand objectives were to:

Increase brand commitment by 5%.

Take a $700K production and media budget to create a genuine moment in Queensland culture. Based on previous experience, they set $100,000 of PR value for local media only.

Have measurable and highly involved engagement of a group of at least 10,000 Queenslanders — people who could become Carlton Mid superfans.

Create an ownable property that could extend beyond a campaign period with ongoing cultural activity.

Sales objectives were to:

Grow market share over the campaign period – something that hadn’t happened in three years.

United Brewery and Clemenger BBDO & Proximity knew they had to build the Carlton Mid brand in key Queensland markets. To do this, they started thinking like a local.

Through research, they discovered Queensland males love to fish. This provided a fantastic opportunity – Carlton Mid’s brand strategy is about finding ways to spend more time with mates, and fishing is a natural cultural fit with this.

The Big Idea

Market research showed that Queenslanders’ trust local media, so the campaign used a number of local press titles such as the Townsville Bulletin and The Morning Bulletin.

Print ads had a dual purpose – to let keen local fishermen know about the competition and to advertise to the more general beer-drinking public that Carlton Mid was doing focused, local activity.

The role of Local Newspapers

Market research showed that Queenslanders’ trust local media, so the campaign used a number of local press titles such as the Townsville Bulletin and The Morning Bulletin.

Print ads had a dual purpose – to let keen local fishermen know about the competition and to advertise to the more general beer-drinking public that Carlton Mid were doing focused, local activity.

Results

Consumer response to the campaign was well above expectation. A total of 27,000 Queenslanders entered the Rich Fish competition.

There was a jump in brand tracking results, particularly relating to brand commitment. The number of people who are committed to Carlton Mid (i.e. have it as one of their top two brands) grew by 20 percent. This was the first positive movement the company had seen in three years.

Sales in Bundaberg, Rockhampton and Townsville achieved an incremental increase of $506,660.

Sources

All data sourced from emma, 12 months to December 2014 except

*Mackisack, Sam, Carlton & United Breweries: How Carlton Mid became a Queensland local (June 2011), WARC.

View Part One of Think Local here.View Part Two of Think Local here.View Part Three of Think Local here.
View Part Four of Think Local here.